Show Notes
Investment teams increasingly build and rely on their own AI tools, but the payoff depends on how deliberately a team reinvests the time that AI frees up. Emerging markets portfolio manager Wen Quan Cheong walks through how his team puts believability-weighted decision making into daily practice, and where AI has genuinely enhanced the process. He closes with a tour of the emerging-market themes he is watching most closely, from reshoring and clean-room capacity to physical AI, low-earth-orbit satellites, and businesses winning simply by putting the customer first. Above all, he returns to the idea that AI's real value lies in what a team chooses to do with the time it saves.
Key Takeaways The team practices believability-weighted decision making: deferring more to teammates with deeper expertise on a given name, while still doing enough independent work to spot blind spots. One of AI's biggest productivity gain so far for the team has been in forensic analysis, running deeper, more consistent checks across longer time periods than a human could alone, freeing up time for higher-value work like idea generation and company research. That saved time is meant to be reinvested, not banked: attending more conferences, joining more management calls, and turning insight generation itself into a discipline, described as "learning compression." On reshoring, the team sees opportunity less in the household names and more in the infrastructure behind the shift: industrial park developers, port operators, and specialized clean-room engineering firms like Acter Group and CTP. Beyond AI and reshoring, the team explores other areas such as physical AI and low-earth-orbit satellites, as well as EM businesses, such as NU Holdings, Bajaj Finance, and HDFC Bank, that win by being more customer-obsessed than entrenched incumbents.
Host: Rob Campbell, CFA Institutional Portfolio Manager Guest: Wen Quan Cheong, CFA Emerging Markets Portfolio Manager
This episode is available for download anywhere you get your podcasts. Founded in 1974, Mawer Investment Management Ltd. (pronounced "more") is a privately owned independent investment firm managing assets for institutional and individual investors. Mawer employs over 250 people in Canada, U.S., and Singapore. Visit us at: https://www.youtube.com/@MawerInvestment https://www.mawer.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/mawer-investment-management/ https://www.instagram.com/mawerinvestmentmanagement/
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